Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction

Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction
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J. Allan Hobson
DREAMING
A Very Short Introduction
1
3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
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ISBN 0–19–280215–1
13579108642
Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
List of figures xi
Introduction xiii
1 What is dreaming? 1
2 Why did the analysis of dream content fail to become a
science?
15
3 How is the brain activated in sleep? 32
4 Cells and molecules of the dreaming brain 48
5 Why dream? The functions of brain activation in
sleep
64
6 Disorders of dreaming 80
7 Dreaming as delirium: sleep and mental illness 88
8 The new neuropsychology of dreaming 96
9 Dreaming, learning, and memory 108
10 Dream consciousness 120
11 The interpretation of dreams 132
Conclusion 141
Index 145

Acknowledgements
The research upon which this book is based was conducted in the
author’s laboratory at the Massachusetts Mental Health Centre when it
was supported by grants for the NIH, NSF, NIDA, and the John T. and
Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation. I thank my colleagues for their
collaboration and Nicholas Tranquillo for help with the manuscript.
This page intentionally left blank
List of figures
1 The Nightcap 13
2 Behavioural states
in humans 37
3 The visual brain
during REM sleep 55
4 Schematic representation
of REM sleep 59
5 How sleep patterns
change over our
lifetime 69
6 Variation in sleep
length 71
7 Autonomic activation
in sleep 82
8 Sleep changes in
depression 95
9 Data from positron
emission tomography
(PET) 100
10 Visual discrimination
task learning and
sleep 113

11 The human brain 122
The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions
in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at
the earliest opportunity.
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
Dreaming has fascinated humankind since the dawn of recorded
history. As dreaming is so vivid, so complex, and so emotional, it
has inspired religious movements, artistic representations, and
introspective scientific theories. All of these pre-modern expressions
have been based on the idea that dreams contain messages that cannot
be delivered in any other way.
Thus, it was thought by the early Judaeo-Christians that God
communicated his intentions via certain prophets to his human
subjects. This concept was the centrepiece of medieval dream theory
with its postulates of the ‘Gates of Horn and Ivory’. Religious reformers
such as Emmanuel Swedenburg were able to meet God’s angels in
dreams and he thereby received instructions about founding the Church
of the New Jerusalem.
Early Western artists, such as Giotto, used dreaming as a vehicle for the
pictorial representation of prophetic inspiration. Sleeping saints and
churchmen are shown in the same pictorial frame as the visions that
their dreams inspired. In modern art, the surrealists expressed through
their wild paintings the conviction that dreaming was a more authentic
state of consciousness than waking. Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, and René
Magritte all painted in dream language. Dali was the most surreal, Ernst
the most psychoanalytic, and Magritte the most neuropsychological of
these artists.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the best known of all dream
investigators would be Sigmund Freud, who set out to base his theory

of the mind on brain science. His knowledge of the brain was so
incomplete that he was forced to abandon his famous ‘Project for a
Scientific Psychology’, and he turned to dreaming for insights about
what he construed to be the dynamic unconscious. He decided, as had
all his symbolist predecessors, that dreams concealed hidden meanings
elaborated as one part of the mind, and that the unconscious tried to
break through the protective barrier of consciousness. Freud thus threw
dream theory back to the time of Biblical scholars, Artemidorus, and
other early interpreters of dreams.
This book takes up where Freud left off when he abandoned his Project.
It tries to build a new dream theory on the now solid and extensive
base of sleep science. To accomplish this goal, I have given a concise
summary of the findings of basic brain research, sleep lab studies, and
recent clinical studies of sleep and dreams. Throughout the book, I use
examples taken from my own dream journal to illustrate how our new
theory of dreams, called activation–synthesis, can be used to explain in
physiological terms universal dream features previously ascribed to
psychodynamic factors. Once this is done, the mystery of dreaming is
largely stripped away, leaving the content nakedly open to
understanding without complex interpretation.
The main goal of this book is to show how a scientific theory of
dreaming has been developed and strengthened over the past 50 years.
In the process, the book offers the reader a unique opportunity to
reconsider his or her own dream theory and, into the bargain, to learn
about the fascinating discoveries of modern sleep science.
Chapter 1
What is dreaming?
What causes dreaming? Why are dreams so strange? Why are they
so hard to remember? A true science of dreaming requires a reliable
definition that can lead to the reliable identification of this state

and methods of measuring its properties. During the course of work
on the brain, which led to the suspicion that it might be brain
activation in sleep that causes dreaming, we realized that the most
scientifically useful way to define and measure dreaming was to
focus on the formal features rather than the content – by this is
meant the perceptual (how we perceive), cognitive (how we think),
and emotional (how we feel) qualities of dreaming, whatever the
details of the individual stories and scenarios might be.
The radical change in emphasis, from the analysis of content to the
analysis of form, exemplifies what scientists call a paradigm shift
(a rapid change in pattern or theory). Through a formal approach,
we found an entirely new and different way of looking at a familiar
phenomenon. Whereas previously students of dreaming had
invariably asked ‘What does the dream mean?’, we asked what the
mental characteristics of dreaming are that distinguish it from
waking mental activity. We are not saying that dream content is
unimportant, uninformative, or even uninterpretable. Indeed, we
believe that dreaming is all three of these things, but it is already
crystal clear that many aspects of dreaming previously thought to
be meaningful, privileged, and interpretable psychologically are the
1
simple reflection of the sleep-related changes in brain state that we
start to detail in Chapter 3.
To provide a firmer grasp of the distinction between form and
content, I offer an example, taken at random from my own dream
journal, which is one of hundreds that I have recorded over the
years. To give a complete sense of how my journal reads and to allow
the reader to compare his or her own notes on dreaming with mine
I quote the entry in full. I know that you will dream of subjects quite
different from mine, but I suspect that the form of your dreams is

similar.
10/5/1987 En route to New Orleans for a debate on dreams at the
American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting:
Two nights ago, a dream of Richard Newland
It is a house maintenance nightmare. I have too much property to
maintain. Richard and a friend are ‘helping’ me but it is an
uncertain alliance, with the twin threats of incompetence and
inattentiveness.
There are several scenes all with the same emotional theme:
anxiety about maintenance details.
In one scene we are walking along in hilly country, perhaps
toward the house, but the destination is not clear.
Then we are in a house, not at all like mine but assumed by my
dreaming brain to be mine, and Richard’s friend is spray painting
the white wall (we have none in our house) with blue paint (neither
do we have any blue rooms). The paint sprayer is a tank device
of the type used to apply copper sulphate to grapevines or to
exterminate cockroaches. Suddenly, the paint is being sprayed not
only on the wall but upon a painting hanging on the wall.
My fears are confirmed. I yell at Richard to bid his friend stop.
For some reason, he has to go upstairs to turn off the machine
(although it appears to be fully portable and self-contained) and this
takes an inordinate length of time as the painting continues to suffer.
There follows a long dialogue with Richard who, while retaining
continuous identity as Richard, changes physiognomy repeatedly.
2
Dreaming
His face changed as follows: a gnome-like Napoleon Carter with a
cherubic sun-burned face; a wry smile and a Chinese coolie-type
hat; a calf face – as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (the ad for

which did not include the calf!); and as far as I can tell, never
included Richard!
I can’t remember other faces or other action from this long episode.
Before discussing the distinctions of form against content that this
dream so clearly illustrates, I should comment on the circumstances
of its recording and the timing of its occurrence. I was on an
aeroplane, where I do a great deal of my journal writing. I was flying
to New Orleans for a highly publicized and well-attended public
debate on dreaming. I usually record dreams on the morning after
their occurrence. The fact that I waited two days in this case
probably resulted in loss of detail. But, as I will presently show,
there is more than enough detail to make clear the distinction
between dream form and dream content.
As far as the content is concerned, the dream is about my concerns
for the upkeep of my farm in northern Vermont, which I have
owned since 1965. Richard Newland is the son of my farmer
neighbour, Marshall Newland, with whom I have had a long and
complicated but successful and gratifying relationship. In spite of
3
What is dreaming?
widely divergent priorities we have managed to get along and to
help each other.
For me, the meaning of the dream is transparent: I am anxious
about my property and about entrusting it to people who are
careless about their own houses. This characteristic, known in
psychological terms as emotional salience (or relevance), is all I
need to understand the dream, which is a variant on the theme of
incomplete arrangements that is so recurrent in my dreams and in
those of most of my friends. For reasons that I discuss more fully in
Chapter 2, I see no need and no justification for treating this dream

as a disguised, symbolic expression of anxiety about other related
themes (my wife’s interest in another Vermont neighbour, for
example). While admitting that it could be appropriate and more
useful to notice such an association, it does not help in
understanding what caused this dream, determined its comical
bizarreness, and made it so hard to remember.
Form as opposed to content
To answer the questions about causes and characteristics of dreams,
it is helpful to take a formal analytical approach.
As is typical of most dreams, I am so involved in the scenario that it
never occurs to me that I am dreaming. As I see Richard Newland
(and his unidentified friend), see my house (even though it is clearly
not mine), see the blue paint as it is sprayed on the walls, and move
through the sequence of scenes, I accept all of these unlikely
features as real on the strength of my hallucinatory perceptions, my
delusional beliefs about them, and my very strong feelings of
anxiety and apprehension.
What this means is that our sense of psychological reality – whether
normal dreaming or a psychotic symptom – is set by the strength of
percepts and feelings as well as by our thoughts about them.
Internally generated perceptions and emotions are two formal
4
Dreaming
features of dreams and they are cardinal features. To explain their
intensity (compared with waking), we might expect to find that
parts of the brain that generate emotions and related percepts are
selectively activated in sleep. We see in Chapter 5 that this is
precisely what happens!
My Richard Newland dream is not simply perceptually vivid and
emotionally salient, it is also cognitively bizarre, by which I mean

that, despite the persistence of the main themes, there is a flagrant
disregard for the constancies of time, place, and person. Notice that
Richard’s friend is not identified; notice also that the house that is
supposed to be mine could not possibly be so; and notice that the
scenes – however poorly recalled and described – meld into one
another: first we are outside walking, then inside painting. Notice,
most of all, that Richard’s face assumes a series of non-Richard
features without ever challenging either the assumption that he is
Richard, or that I am not awake but dreaming, as even a glimmer of
self-reflective awareness would declare me to be.
These are the cardinal cognitive features of dreaming: loss of
awareness of self (self-reflective awareness); loss of orientational
stability; loss of directed thought; reduction in logical reasoning;
and, last but not least, poor memory both within and after the
dream. The fact that the incongruities and discontinuities of my
Richard Newland dream are connected by association does not
explain the looseness of those associations. Thus, it is true that the
unusual spray-painting device resembles an agricultural tool; it is
also true that Richard’s transformed face is, first, that of another
Vermont farmer neighbour, Napoleon Carter, and later a calf
(Richard and his dairy farmer father, Marshall, had many calves);
and it is remarkably true that Shakespeare himself celebrated the
transformation of characters – turning them into each other and
even into animals – in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
What causes the processing of such extreme associations
(hyperassociative processing)? Freud, like his followers, religiously
5
What is dreaming?
believed that dream bizarreness was a psychological defence against
an unacceptable unconscious wish. This seemed unlikely to many

people in 1900. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it
seems impossible to us.
Just as we expect (and find) selective activation of brain circuits
underlying emotion and related percepts in rapid eye movement
(REM) sleep, so we seek (and find) selective inactivation of brain
circuits – and chemicals – underlying memory, directed thought,
self-reflective awareness, and logical reasoning.
You may be more or less pleased by the story. You might prefer to
believe that your dreams are secret messages of personal portent.
But whether you like the story or not, you must surely be as
dismayed as we were to realize that we did not really need brain
research to take this formal approach to dreaming. Common sense
alone should have dictated at least that form and content were
complementary. The distinction is made with ease in other fields:
consider linguistics, where grammar and syntax are
complementary; consider poetry, where meter and verse enhance
one another; and consider the visual arts, where genre and subject
matter interact for strong effect. So, why not the domain of mental
life itself? Why not in dreams? Isn’t the form of dreams an
important contributor to content?
As shown in Chapter 2, some brave souls did make this distinction,
but their feeble voices were drowned out by the clamour of the
interpreters who pandered to the deep-seated human need to
believe that dreaming, as for every apparent mystery, has a deeply
veiled meaning inscribed by a benevolent hand whose ways are
known only to a few chosen mediators.
Dreaming and how to measure it
Let’s begin our analytical odyssey by accepting the most broad,
general, and indisputable definition of dreaming: mental activity
6

Dreaming
occurring in sleep. But what kinds of mental activity occur in sleep?
Many different kinds, for example:
Report 1. As soon as I fell asleep, I could feel myself moving just the
way the sea moved our boat when I was out fishing today.
Report 2. I kept thinking about my upcoming exam and about the
subject matter that it will contain. I didn’t sleep well because I kept
waking up and was inevitably pulled back to the same ruminations
about my exam.
Report 3. I am perched on a steep mountaintop; the void falls away
to the left. As the climbing party rounds the trail to the right, I am
suddenly on a bicycle, which I steer through the group of climbers.
It becomes clear that I make a complete circuit of the peak (at this
level) by staying on the grass. There is, in fact, a manicured lawn
surface continuing between the rocks and crags.
All these reports qualify as descriptions of dreaming according to
our broad definition, although they are very different from one
another and each is typical of the kind of sleep in which it was
experienced.
Report 1 contains an internal percept, the sense of rhythmic
movement imparted by the sea to a boat and to those on board the
boat. This report is typical of sleep-onset dreams, especially on
nights following novel motor behaviour such as skiing, or boating,
or even – as in Robert Frost’s poem – After Apple Picking. The
subject has been boating, and the sense of motion, which abated
immediately upon putting his foot on shore, recommences at sleep
onset and reproduces, exactly, the physical experience of boating.
We will have more to say later about this stimulus-induced dream,
especially when we look at the theme of motor learning later in the
book. For now, let us emphasize how short and relatively simple this

sleep-onset dream experience is. Even though it is hallucinatory, as
is Report 3, it is impoverished in its brevity and its narrow scope, its
7
What is dreaming?
lack of characters other than the dreamer, and its emotional
flatness. Many sleep-onset dream reports are richer and more
variegated than this one, although they are all brief and lack the
elaborate plot development of Report 3.
Report 2 is limited to thinking, or what psychologists call cognition.
There is no perceptual structure, and hence no hallucinatory aspect.
There is emotion, however. The dreamer is anxious about
performance on a test and this anxiety appears to drive obsessive
thinking very much in the way that it might be expected to do so in
waking. The thinking described is non-progressive. The dreamer
doesn’t even rehearse the content of the exam material in a way that
might be adaptive. Accounts of rumination such as this are often
given when individuals are aroused from sleep early in the night. If
they are collected in a sleep lab – as described in Chapter 3 – they
are associated with the low levels of brain activation that typify what
we call slow wave sleep (seen on the electroencephalograph or EEG)
or non-REM sleep (NREM; this refers to the lack of eye
movement). Mental activity in NREM sleep later in the night, when
brain activation approaches that seen in REM sleep, can assume
many of the properties of Report 3.
Report 3 is a typical REM sleep report: it is animated; it is dramatic
and complex; it is bizarre; it is hallucinatory; it is delusional; and it
is long, about eight to ten times as long as Reports 1 and 2 (which
were given in their entirety), whereas only a small excerpt of Report
3 is given here. In the rest of Report 3, there was a scene change
from the mountain peak to Martha’s Vineyard Island (though I

was still on the same bicycle), and then to a shopping centre, a
restaurant, a dance, and a meeting of faculty colleagues. The dream
also exemplifies typical dream features, such as character instability,
because one of my colleague’s wives is seen as a blond when, in
reality, she is a brunette. The sense of movement, which is
continuous, becomes particularly delightful when I become
practically weightless and glide along a golf fairway. At the
dance there is ‘a Baltic group wearing embroidered peasant
8
Dreaming
garb and stamping the floor to a loud band (I can hear the drums
especially).’
There is simply no comparison between the richness of Report 3
and the restrictions of Reports 1 and 2, even though Report 2 fulfils
this more rigorous definition of dreaming.
Report 3 more fully illustrates a mental experience occurring in
sleep, which is characterized by:
1. Rich and varied internal percepts, especially sensorimotor
(movement), auditory (drums), and anti-gravitational
(weightlessness) hallucinations.
2. Delusional acceptance of the wild events as real despite their
extreme improbability (a bike on a mountain peak?) and physical
impossibility (gliding weightless on a golf fairway?).
3. Bizarreness deriving from the discontinuity (at least six locations)
and character incongruity (a blond brunette?).
4. Emotional intensity and variety (fear, elation, and exuberance).
5. Poor reasoning – I can make a complete circuit of the peak by
staying on the grass!
When we think about how the very different experiences in the
three dream reports were brought about, and even what they may

mean, we can easily understand the first two simply in terms of
brain activation that reflects, in sleep, the dreamer’s previous
experience (the boat trip) and concerns about the future (anxiety
about an exam). In both cases, the residual brain activation of sleep
onset and early night sleep is enough to reproduce faithfully a very
small part of waking experience. Report 3, however, needs a much
more elaborate explanation to account for its description of events,
many of which never happened and never could have happened.
Brain activation, which must be powerful, and highly selective, can
account for some aspects – the hallucinatory imagery and the
associated movements, for example. But activation cannot account
for the bizarreness and the loss of logical reasoning. If brain
9
What is dreaming?
activation were global in REM sleep, we would expect orientation
and cognition to improve, not deteriorate. These changes must
result from something else, something that changes the whole
mode of operation of the brain and the mind. As we see in
Chapters 4 and 5, this change in mode is affected both chemically
and by selective brain deactivation. The net effect is that, in
dreaming (compared with waking), some mental functions are
enhanced while others are diminished. It’s as simple as that!
And every bit as complicated.
Does everyone dream?
All human beings who have been studied in sleep labs have
brain activation in sleep. Periods of brain activation during
sleep are associated with rapid eye movements in the sleeper.
These rapid eye movements give the brain-activated phase of
sleep its name: REM or rapid eye movement sleep. When
awakened at the time of intense clusters of rapid eye

movements, 95 per cent of sleepers studied in labs report
dreaming. From this evidence, it is generally assumed that
everyone does, in fact, dream in sleep; any impression to the
contrary is related to the difficulty recalling dreams.
If dreaming is not interrupted by awakening, it is rare to
have recall. Poor or no dream recall by many people is a
function of the abolition of memory during these brain-
activated phases of sleep. As the chemical systems that are
responsible for recent memory are completely turned off
when the brain is activated during sleep, it is difficult to have
recall unless an awakening occurs to restore the availability
of these chemicals to the brain.
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Dreaming